"Trying Not To Be Too Sunny" arose from frustration! Literary journals often decline “nature poems,” seldom accept upbeat poems, and rarely allow references to religion unless poems place God or the church on a skewer. All of those “not’s” collided in this poem, like heat igniting a cool front on a summer day, before rising like laundry-steam in prayer. Did I think any of those thoughts as I actually wrote the poem? No, but as the lines and metaphors cleared, that’s what made sense to me.